


of the body, relating to words, and able to be touched

by the merienes tranch (lilhalphys)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Denial of Feelings, Holding Hands, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Pining, Scars, chapter three contains spoilers through . .. episode 76. refjorged, my Usual Prose Bullshit, spoilers for episode 72 of campaign 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-07-24 01:53:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20018311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilhalphys/pseuds/the%20merienes%20tranch
Summary: Caleb’s thought, before, about pre-portioning out the ingredients for Fireball. But he cannot devise a way to incorporate the motion of uncorking a glass vial into his somatic ritual - cannot break the habit, any part of it - and he cannot fathom the waste of smashing the vial open every time.----Fjord has complex hands.----Caleb is a spellcaster, born and bred, and that is the fact that defines him, defines how he sees and touches the world around him.Somatic. Verbal. Material.





	1. hands

**Author's Note:**

> Hands are distinct from Words and from Things, so Caleb doesn’t say what he’s thinking either.

Somatic. Adjective. Of the body, the physical, the meat, the bones, the matter of the brain itself but not of the wiring, not of the little sparks that keep alive the soul that carries the meat and the bones and hides behind the matter of the brain itself.

In spellcasting, somatic means hands. Somatic means movements, means hiding in alleys to wave a hand in front of one's face and walking out of that alley a different person, means its easy to get caught cheating at games of chance, means the first thing they do when they capture spellcasters is break their fingers. 

Caleb rolls the sulfur between his fingers, relishes in the familiar-like-home way it smells against the heat of the Kiln, sticks to his fingers, catches in grains under his nails. Material. Somatic. A match and the motion of striking it. But he is silent, and that is what matters. Verbal. Material.

Somatic. Hands.

He’s thought, before, about pre-portioning out the ingredients for Fireball. But he cannot devise a way to incorporate the motion of uncorking a glass vial into his somatic ritual - cannot break the habit, any part of it - and he cannot fathom the waste of smashing the vial open every time.

And the scars left by broken glass shards are too familiar, too even, too sporadic, too, too, too…

He cannot risk such damage to his hands. 

Before he goes to bed, he dismisses Frumpkin with a snap of his fingers. Somatic, again.

\----

Fjord has complex hands. 

His claw-like nails are not as sharp as they appear, and there is little strength behind his grip for someone so tall and broad. The weight of his hand sits, highly-present and warm in Caleb’s own, the memory of a lifetime of sailing etched in every callus and scar. They’re different from Caleb’s, sailing isn’t farming, and it’s even been a while since Caleb’s done that much. His hands are little more than old, tattered canvas, the skin of his forearms littered with nicks like a butcher’s cutting board. 

The contact is searing without the wraps around his arms. It screams out like it’s burning alive, like “we’ll make it work,” like “leave no trace,” like “always,” “always,” “always,”

But the hands do not really say anything. Somatic is not Verbal. Hands are distinct from Words and from Things, so Caleb doesn’t say what he’s thinking either. 

\----

The palm of his hand aches in memory, and he wonders what would have happened if he had never let go, in Dashilla’s lair. Had pulled Fjord closer, smothered himself in water and leather armor, their hands clasped impossibly tight. Had gone further than that, even, but -

But he stops himself. Grounds himself in the sulfur in his hands. Somatic is not Verbal. Movements are not Words. Hands is not Mouths. 

\----

Fjord is the ocean. Deep and suffocating and cold and welcoming and warm and smothering and too much, so much that Caleb can never get enough, can never ask for it. 

\----

They both cast spells. Most of their party does. 

Jester is very fidgety. Unrefined. She casts a Spiritual Weapon with a motion like swinging a blade, the weight of it visible in her posture even though her hands are empty. She brings her hands, flat, up to her mouth and blows over them like spreading shimmering dust onto paper and sometimes its fairy unicorns that appear, sometimes its a thick cloud of bumblebees.

Caduceus, like a plant, or a mushroom, stalwart in the dirt, only moves as much as he must, with the routine, consistent gestures of someone who has spent many years alone practicing for just such an occasion. With a wave of his hand, like a greeting, or, more appropriately, a farewell, a horde of zombies turns and flees. He wags his finger like a disapproving parent, and a great creature with the power to kill them all is suddenly weaker, prone to miss them, prone to suffer from their other spells.

Fjord casts spells like he was never taught how to. He shouts too loud, moves too much, uses too much of his components. But it works, really, his blasts of force exploding with great power as they travel up his outstretched arm, sparking and shaking along with the reverberation of his voice. The slam of his blade into the wooden deck of the ship only harmonizes with the forceful reverberating Boom of his Thunderstep, and Caleb tells himself that his heart is pounding from how close he is to death, from the sudden forceful movement and not the press of Fjord’s arm across his chest, holding him up under his arms, his hand digging into Caleb’s shoulder, his mouth inches from Caleb’s ear. Verbal. 

Fjord wanted to study at the Soltryce, Caleb remembers, and he thinks about Fjord’s spellcasting as more elegant. Hammered from its haphazard, rustic beauty into the standardized, military arcana of the Scourgers. And gods, it hurts him to even imagine. He chooses to find a sick comfort in the fact that they’d turn him away, for a lack of parents to kill.

\----

And then he wakes up the next day, and Fjord doesn’t cast spells any more.


	2. words

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Verbal. Adjective. Relating to words. Verbal is Spoken. Not a language but an invocation, a prayer, a command rooted in the glowing Threads woven into the Fabric of the Universe. 
> 
> Not Material - not physical, not of objects like books. Not Somatic. Unmoving, ever-changing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to know about you. And I am suffocating under the weight of it.

Verbal. Adjective. Relating to words. Out of context, it’s like ink in books. In context, though, Verbal is Spoken. Not a language but an invocation, a prayer, a command rooted in the glowing Threads woven into the Fabric of the Universe. 

Not Material - not physical, not of objects like books. Not Somatic. Unmoving, ever-changing.

It is different, for every spell. Transmutation is quiet, lilting and lopping and slipping past his lips like so much sand and molasses and chips of iron. Divination is hollow, feels like its coming from high above his throat, between his teeth, from his sinus cavity, from inside his eyes. Abjuration is deeper, from his chest, deep and assertive and afraid because he wouldn’t need it if he wasn’t afraid.

Evocation is loud. It is barked like a military command and spicy on the back of his tongue, and he is so intimately familiar with all its subtleties. Astrid once told him that he muttered the Verbal components of Fire Bolt in his sleep. She was worried he’d burn their quarters down, she’d said. 

Verbal. Words. 

\---

“We’ll make it work,” Fjord says, about the group. 

It is before they are the Mighty Nein. He says it in Common but with all the quiet, certain inevitability of Divination, like he knows it for sure, that this Group will work out. 

And it’s been a while, since anyone but Nott has placed such faith into him, or anything he did. And it is strange, and the taste of Fjord’s words makes his mouth fuzzy, like a new school of magic entirely, like a slightly more bitter Enchantment.

And like being charmed, Caleb finds himself in agreement.

\---

Fjord’s variety of spellcasting, like Caleb’s, would be described as arcane. Though it is bestowed upon him by a higher power, it lacks the purity held by the divine magic of clerics and druids.

Arcana is defined by its perversions. A dirty Word, however fitting.

What distinguishes Fjord’s magic from Caleb is not the Word, not the Filth of it, but the Blade. Fjord isn’t anywhere near as strong as Yasha, as fast as Beauregard or Nott, but he still wields his blade with proficiency, with prowess that smells of his pact, like he’s almost persuading his enemies to very kindly accept his blade into their torso. 

For a while, Caleb thought the blade itself was the symbol, Fjord’s unholy deal made flesh and metal and amber. He thought he felt the corruption seeping from it like water - unable to find purchase under his skin, already soaked to the bone with it - when Fjord had pressed it against the flesh of his neck. 

“Leave no trace,” Fjord had said, then. And the words struck chords in Caleb, violent, like a machete cutting through underbrush. Because Arcana is about perversion, about taking what one can get their grubby little hands on, be it formal training from master Arcanists or the wayward spell scroll. “Making it work,” he’d thought, was about making the group stronger. Caleb with the scroll is stronger, and the group is stronger when Caleb is stronger.

But perhaps, Caleb had thought then, Fjord wasn’t quite as good with his words as he had initially thought.

Of course, like a ritual, like a heist, like the pursuit of power, it is not so simple.

“Always,” Fjord says under Dashilla’s lair. And the Word is more powerful than Evocative Hellfire, than turning lead into gold, than a Wish, even, if Caleb’s feeling particularly sentimental. It’s a promise. It’s something like a shield, like an extra layer of clothing protecting Caleb from the incoming wrath of his past mistakes.

That's the thing about the Word. It is not just the Verbal, not just sound vibrating through air, through water, but it is the promise. The certainty. “You have my word.” It sounds like something Fjord would say. 

“Cut palm to cut palm.”

And Caleb pauses. Words are not Hands are not the Blood mixing into the water around them. They are separate, to Caleb. They have to be. Or else he’ll go too far. If Hands are Mouths, and Hands and Palms are touching, then why, then why, then why, then why

then why not?

\---

“Idiot,” Caleb says to himself in Zemnian, quiet enough to not wake his companions sleeping around him in the Kiln, “Get ahold of yourself.”

\---

Days, weeks later. Fjord is not alone when he says, in a new Voice, “Let’s see what this does.”

Caleb wishes he could see it as a sort of deception, but that is not how the Word works. This other accent, he reasons, is something like a different School of Magic. Like starting a fight with Transmutative buffs before lighting the whole thing aflame. 

Accents, spell components, it’s all just Words. 

“Is there anything from your past,” Caleb says.  _ That you want to tell me? Can you trust me? I want to hear the sound of your Voice, whichever one it is. I want to know about you. And I am suffocating under the weight of it. I am “making it work” for the group, you know. But this isn’t just for them. I do not deserve the normalcy of an unhappy discussion about childhoods, but you do, you do, you do, Fjord.  _

The thing about the Word is, is that it is difficult. It is like a miscast spell, sometimes, sometimes it doesn’t come out quite right. He doesn’t Say any of that.

“I like this new me,” Fjord says, jarring to Caleb’s ears because it is a response to what he actually Said, not what he Wanted to say, “I love it.”

\---

And then he wakes up the next day, and Fjord doesn’t cast spells any more, and his voice is different. For good, this time, and for better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> soooooo ! finally got this one hammered out. took a good bit longer than anticipated, but here it is. the third chapter will hopefully be faster *knocks on wood* and will also include something relevant to this idea that have come up in episodes that have aired since i initially outlined this. as always, thanks for reading and your feedback is so so so soooo appreciated and loved!!!


	3. things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Material. Adjective. Of the physical world, of things that are able to be touched.
> 
> That is the fickle thing about fire. It consumes wood and grass and paper and flesh - all material, all real - and is itself immaterial. One cannot touch Heat or Light, not safely anyway. Fire will eat and eat and eat and leave only ash. Nothing like evidence, nothing real enough to be grounding. Nothing - nothing material.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> He is lying to himself. He has been, for a while.

Material. Adjective. Of the physical world, of things that are able to be touched.

That is the fickle thing about fire. It consumes wood and grass and paper and flesh - all material, all real - and is itself immaterial. One cannot touch Heat or Light, not safely anyway. Fire will eat and eat and eat and leave only ash. Nothing like evidence, nothing real enough to be grounding. Nothing - nothing material.

\---

Caleb lays flat, floating, most of his body just barely submerged under the surface of the ocean. It’s like flying, like tapping into the pervasive possibility of the Dodecahedron. It isn’t like touching water, more like the water is touching him, holding him. 

And then in an instant, Fjord is behind him, scaring him, and he is under.

In the moment that it happens, he gasps, and water fills his lungs. Material.

Fjord pulls him up to the surface under by his arm, smacks his shoulder gently, to help him cough it up. Somatic.

“Easy, there,” he says, “Easy.” Verbal.

And where his chest was once filled with water, it surges with what Caleb knows will be his damnation. He recognizes the feeling from over a decade and a half ago but he hesitates, for his own safety, to name it. His heart beats, laden with it, and it’s too sweet against the back of his tongue to be fear, and that’s worse. That’s so much worse.

That’s the thing about emotions, they’re like fire. They aren’t somatic, aren’t in his hands for how much they’ve taken root in his chest. They aren’t verbal; he cannot say them out loud, never could. They aren’t material. He cannot touch them because if he could he would rip them from his chest and take them in his hands and then press and pull and rip and

Because they aren’t Verbal, Somatic, Material, he cannot use them. They won’t help him. They can’t.

\---

Caleb crushes a particularly large chunk of sulfur between his fingers. He is lying to himself, in all his muttered counting. He has been, for a while. 

He is touching his Things with his Hands, counting them with his Voice and Words. He cannot organize every bit and piece of spellcasting into neat little boxes, however hard he tries, however much he begs and prays. 

He cannot forget the sensation of a hand burning a brand into his, of a whispered “always.” He cannot separate Hands and Mouths.

“We really are in it now, friend,” he says to Frumpkin, pets him, accidentally leaving bits of sulfur behind in his fur. He is looking at Fjord’s prone form, on the other side of their room in the Kiln. He hopes he is sleeping well.

\---

Material. Noun. The stuff itself, the things from which other things are made.

It often refers to fabric. Like coats, like robes, like dresses and cloaks and finery. And uniforms. And sails.

\---

As he pulls the Glove of Blasting over Fjord’s arm, Caleb finds himself, guiltily, relishing in the sort of indirect contact, the warmth of Fjord’s skin barely penetrating through the fabric and leather. He wonders if the shadow of parents murdered, dashed to ash lingers in the folds of the Glove, hopes Fjord can’t distinguish Caleb’s particularly bitter, overcooked, burnt flavor of orphan from his own. 

They stand, the lot of them, on a precipice in the Kiln, as Fjord unleashes the bursts of flame that simmer under the surface, woven into the cloth of the glove. And the fire looks wrong, almost, as it leaves his hand.

Fjord had wanted to study at the Soltryce, before.

\---

Caleb wonders about the intricate workings of iceflex, contemplates how the mithril takes to the dragon’s breath. Wonders, so he may not think about the residuum. He’s trying to decompartmentalize that part of his brain, but he can still relish in the fact that there is only so much room in his head for Material. 

So he thinks, safe in the Hut, about iceflex. 

Well, less about iceflex, and more about Fjord, really. It starts at enchanted mithril and ends up far away, ends up just a few feet away from Caleb, tension and fear obvious in the line of Fjord’s jaw.

Emotions are not material, like the Glove Fjord wears, that Caleb gave him, like the iceflex that Caleb prays will be his salvation. They are not Somatic, like the hand filling the Glove, the hand that will hold the iceflex sword.They are not verbal, like all the charged words that have simmered the inches of gap between the two of them like the air above a campfire, smelling of salt, for months now. 

But, well, nothing is so simple, hasn’t been for a decade and a half.

So Caleb reaches

\---

Fjord stands, sword in hand, rejuvenated and beautiful, his magic now Divine.

Caleb, Arcana bred and bled into him, cannot help but be fascinated. He does not know what this means, can only hope that he’ll at least use the same Components, at least keep that passion for magic, for casting, for the inherent creation of it all. A selfish part of him recognizes the connection lost, longs to feel it again.

But, and he needs to keep telling himself this, Magic is not People is not Emotions. Perhaps it’s just as bad as before because it’s still boxes, but it’s better boxes. Fjord has different Magic, and a different Voice, but it is still Fjord. 

Still his hands, if nothing else.

\---

So Caleb reaches out and clasps Fjord’s hand in his own. And he doesn’t say a word. Not because Somatic is not Verbal is not Material, but because he doesn’t need to.

And he will wake up the next morning, and Fjord will be different again, probably, but it will be for the better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOuuuugh. 
> 
> i told myself going in that theyd have a cool kiss at the end of this one. that theyd get a satisfying ARC. someone used the phrase "failure to launch" in a comment on one of my other fics talking about these two and i FEEL that. so much. sorry they didnt kiss in this one either. i promise at some point ill write something where they kiss more than like once or whatever.
> 
> BUT i hope you enjoyed this one even though they didnt kiss. im really excited where their dynamic is going right now (maybe i wont have to write them kissing all by myself, maybe theyll just do it....)
> 
> AS ALWAYS! thank you so much for your continued support. could not do this without you. school is gonna kick my ass so unless the muse hits me particularly hard im gonna probably be slow to post anything here for a while (have a couple wips im looking to maybe pick back up)
> 
> whatever happens, i wish you all the best <3

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading! 
> 
> i seem to have done it again - another widofjord one shot turned into a three chapter thing while writing. i think i might have to make a series of all my widofjord prose. i guess the only problem with that would be that theyre all in different "universes" of canon divergence. i'll figure it out.
> 
> also ive neglected to put this note in far too many of my wf fics. SO MUCH LOVE to the widofjord discord. i truly could not find as much joy in this fandom as i do without all your love and support.
> 
> as always, i love and thrive off of your wonderful feedback! please kudos and comment if you enjoyed!


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